Yes, you can make online videos do some cool tricks aimed to run up the viewer counter. But one thing you can’t do is trick the hosting site. If you add commands to the video’s code (say, to make it loop) and then embed it from its original site, the powers-that-be will know you’re scamming them right away. Google employs some pretty slick programmers. People ought to be happy about that since Google controls everyone’s cyber lives now, regardless of operating system or web browser (that thing you open to look at the internet). It’s easy to add commands to a video and make it loop-play after one second, thinking you’re going to rack up the viewer count. YouTube halts the counter after about five (5) loops or auto-plays (meaning the video plays when you land on the page). They may never allow your video to count hits again, ever, so don’t experiment with a video you really want to go viral with.
Besides, Google owns YouTube. You should be really happy about that, as well. Why? Because if you upload a video to YouTube, and you give it a great title, Google will kick your search results up on ALL search engines. Um, for free. So, say you have a bike shop, and you have a website for your bike shop. You sign up for a YouTube Channel and start uploading videos about bike-riding in your hometown. You load some more videos about fixing a flat tire on a bike and other maintenance stuff. You call them things like, “Bike-riding in Roanoke, VA” and “How to Fix a Flat Tire on a Bike” and “Worst Bike Ever.” (After a while, you will learn to use silly titles. And yes, sex sells, so “Hot Girls on Bikes” might get you somewhere.)
Be sure to name your channel something relevant, such as the exact name of your store or brand. Use it in your video’s description. Use it in your tags. Tags are the words that help your video come up on a search - not only in YouTube, but on the web itself. (Google owns YouTube, remember?) It doesn’t matter if you use Bing or Yahoo or whatever as your search engine. Google (DMOZ) is the scraper that acts like a huge cyber rolodex. Now that your company name is splattered all over your video channel, an online search for “bike shop, roanoke” will display results not only for your videos but also for your website (and anything else associated with your company name, like a Facebook or Twitter page).
So how hard is that? Most of these online sites are fairly simple to use. You don’t have to get fancy. A company or business web site might be the only thing that needs to look polished. Everything else, like your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, or WordPress pages can take its time while you get the hang of it… no hurry. I’ve heard quotes up to $300 to “make” a Facebook page for clients. Please rent a kid in your family or on your block and give them a nice bowl of ice-cream. You know, the kid you used when you couldn’t figure out how to work the VCR remote… But the more you yourself play with these “social” sites, the more you’ll understand. You can hook up most of these sites to feed each other updates so you won’t have to keep logging into all of your accounts just to tell everyone you posted one new article or uploaded a new video.
There are also a lot of extra tools (if you want to know more) that you can utilize with most any site. The most important would be to keep track of traffic, what that traffic did, who they are (in general), where they are, and how long they paid attention and to what. That will help you determine whether they liked or didn’t like something about your website pages, blog articles, videos, and so on. This is called Analytics, which Google (and its YouTube site) offers for free. Use the results to plan your future marketing efforts.
If you’re worried about becoming really popular: Don’t. Just provide good content, good products, get your business name out on various places, stay current, be accessible and be sociable. I have to quote Jeffrey Gitomer, who says, “People hate to be sold, but they love to buy.” So, knock off the sales pitch. And quit making it about “helping people” too. Barf, barf. This is the information age, not the helpless age. People want to learn for themselves and the information is there. People are no longer helpless. Information is not a commodity anymore. It’s free. (PS – where do you think most of these “gurus” get all their info from?)
The Web is not such a mystery. There’s really not much you can do to screw it up. And it doesn’t take a genius to do Social Networking. How do you think kids do it? They play with it. So go play with it. Just remember to update your anti-virus and be sure to set your third-party cookies to “prompt.” If you want more protection, go to Adobe’s website and set your flash settings to block those invasive .sol files which by-pass your cookies security. Now you’re fairly safe to go back in the Web 2.0 water.
Nice description (with pictures) on how to set up third-party cookie handling:
http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/disable-first-and-third-party-cookies-in-ie8/
Here’s where you can learn about flash settings:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html
That’s it for “Social Networking” for now…
My next techie article will be a lesson on how to speak on-camera.
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